FF16 is out in a week, demo is out now and lets you play the prologue and save the progress for the main game. It also has a section that takes you to a later part of the game to explore more moves and deeper combat. It does a great job to set up the story, I am all in. It’s got this sort of GoT vibe with political intrigue and some really fucked up family dynamics. The way it ends damn. It takes a while to get used to mature FF, lots of fucks, shits and cocks.

I am not sure how this will do with reviews, it seems to be a pretty linear action game. Every location I played was just a straight line with really tiny extra spaces to get items. There are basically no RPG systems present, you can’t even horde items, you can only have 5 potions on you at a time, if you find more it’s auto used. Gear is more power or defense, some accessories give more powers to certain moves. Leveling up is just gaining new moves and leveling those moves up. I hope there are more base moves cause it’s really shallow compared to DMC, it has some of the DMC moves but not enough. The meat of the customization is the summon powers, you have up to three and they have many different power attacks you can pick and choose to equip and level up.

The feel is really good, clearly the DNA is from the DMC like action games complete with stingers, air juggles, jump step on enemies and  devil trigger limit breaks. In the first part of the demo you get one summon, fights were long and a bit of a chore. You have to stagger an enemy which takes time, then they just sit there as you attack for a while trying to get max damage and you repeat that like 4 times. Dodging is just pressing a button at the right time. Bosses have quicker attacks and it’s a fun flow to it. There are many cinematic QTE moments too.


It wasn’t until the extra demo mode where I really got to try the combat. So after you save your progress of the first part of the game you can play an extra section from later in the game that’s custom designed for the demo with lots of advanced powers. I skipped the story here to not spoil anything. Again the level was nothing but hallways and fights but man when you get three summons of different types, limit breaks, dog attacks and so on combat becomes frantic.

I still feel too OP, hopefully the game is harder but man is it fun to obliterate groups of enemies while practically teleporting around the battlefield. Fire uppercut this guy, air whip a guy to you and air juggle him, sword dash into another guy, use a huge rock smash for an AoE. The moves have a cool down timer that is quick so you can cycle through them near constantly. It gets hard to tell when to dodge, honestly I am moving so much I can’t even tell if I’m getting hurt.

It ends with a massive boss battle on a roof, this boss is awesome. Great attack set, it’s multistaged, lots of dodging and countering needed. I loved it and showed the potential of the combat. Not exactly top of the line action games but the presentation and rest of the world will make up for that I assume. The summon battle I did was super basic, like a glorified QTE almost but man is it impressive to watch

As for performance ehhh, graphics mode is 30FPS but the motion blur is ridiculous. Also I don’t want to play a hardcore action game at 30fps. So I go performance and it’s not stable, it’s actually ok during fights but outside it fluctuates a lot. Why can’t we get a 40fps mode? The summon battles are 30FPS graphics mode no matter what you pick, I like that it changes. So performance for combat, graphics for anything else.

I will greatly enjoy this game. If conbat is not your thing I don’t see why you would want to play it. It’s a DMC game with a FF adventure stuck on it.

Yeah it’s so dark but it’s also kind of cool to see Final Fantasy just lean so heavily into it. The combat is so good. Loved the demo and have the physical Deluxe version preordered. Am really looking forward to start playing the full version next weekend.